Ok but who cares about your finance department, and more importantly, why would your finance department care for a technology choice of the engineering teams? The fucked up thing is your finance department in this scenario, not Charm
What? I'm not questioning whether the weapons research actually happened. I'm questioning the sincerity of people claiming they didn't know what they were doing. I've seen plenty of weapons programs. They aren't a secret to the people working on them. My point is, the government doesn't need to lie to researchers or even pay them very well to get them to develop weapons because there are plenty of intelligent-enough people willing to do it almost for free.
I've worked as a contractor for a safety system that turned out to be for a foreign military. I was given a signal, and told to write software to fit it. The signal could plausibly be collected for a wide variety of civilian purposes.
What I realized later was that none of the civilian markets could possibly justify the cost of the project.
The particular type of signal fitting I was doing was only achievable by a few thousand expensive domain experts in the world, so, I think that addresses your other point.
They knew the US was at war and they knew it was a government program for military purposes and they knew they were dealing nuclear materials.
A journalist not involved at all figured it out just fine, but at the very least it's not like it wasn't going to be a weapon.
Frankly though I wonder what the various judgemental people in these comments think about say, the tens of thousands of people who at the time were just straight up making artillery ammo.
If "This doesn't fit into my mental model, so everyone else must be lying" is how you deal with things you didn't personally experience, do what you have to.
The inability to accurately cite any story about this, and the "friend of a friend" structure is what implies it's garbage.
Not to mention it itself requires a conspiracy theory: "no one would do this work voluntarily" (or "all the smart people have to be tricked because they're so smart they obviously agree with me").
As though people don't just go and work at Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
The much more common reason is compartmentalisation. Employees are told as much as they need to know, no more.
If someone can design a glide bomb without knowing that it has an explosive payload, then they're not told.
The fear is not so much the employees themselves (they might be quite patriotic!) but that the information will leak out to the enemy, giving them a chance to counter the weapon or copy it.
That's a very different proposition to what the various parent posters are implying though. Like if you work for a defense contractor, you know what your work is for even if you wouldn't know exactly what the product or application was.
15 years ago, almost every news site had a RSS feed, some had several ones. Today? RSS feed is rare.
It may be a reflection of where you get your news.
New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Radio Free Europe, Mainichi, and lots of other legitimate primary source Big-J journalism news sites have RSS.
Rando McRepost's AI-Generated Rehash Blog? Not so much.
I’m not an AI engineer but it’s not hard to imagine why some bright talent would want to work at the most exciting AI companies in the US while also making 3-10x what they’d make in Europe.
Ideology is easy to throw around for internet comments but working on the cutting edge stuff next to the brightest minds in the space will always be a major personal draw. Just look at the Manhattan project, I doubt the primary draw for all of those academics was getting to work on a bomb. It was the science, huge funding, and interpersonal company.
See my other comments around here. This idea that salaries in the US are so much higher than Europe for all these top AI roles just isn’t true. Even the big American companies have been opening offices in places like London to hire the top talent at high salaries.
This also isn’t hypothetical. I know top-talent engineers and researchers that have moved out of the USA in the last 12 months due to the political climate (which goes beyond just the AI topics).
And you might want to read a few books on the Manhattan project and the people involved before you use that analogy. I don’t think it’s particularly strong.
> I know top-talent engineers and researchers that have moved out of the USA in the last 12 months due to the political climate
Are they working remotely for US companies? In Canada that’s very much still the case everywhere you look
> Even the big American companies have been opening offices in places like London to hire the top talent at high salaries.
I assumed this discussion was about rejecting working for US companies who would be susceptible to the executive branch’s bullying, not whether you can you make a US tier salary off American companies while not living in America. If you’re doing that you might as well live in America among among the other talent and maximize your opportunities.
No, it’s a counterpoint on salaries… “Even the American companies” ie they wouldn’t have to open offices here, nor would they have to pay high salaries, to compete for talent if everyone they wanted was in the US or could be so easily attracted to move to the US. The point is clearly things aren’t so one-sided as people seem to think.
Translation: I didn't read this, so I don't know what it says and I don't know what I'm talking about, but I desperately need to post on the internet, so here's something I just made up…
The website blocks my ISP unfortunately, so I am not able to read it. Same thing when trying with a VPN as well. And the archive.ph link posted elsewhere in this thread is an endless captcha loop for me.
Around 1987 I mostly completed a Unix-like OS for the C-64 called MATRIX. I was probably around six weeks away from burning it to a PROM when I got a new girlfriend and completely lost interest in the project.
I don't remember too much about it, other than:
- Because Commodore drives had ludicrously long file names for the era, paths like /etc/dev/joy1 didn't need any weirdness.
- Password encryption? What's that?
- What we would call "metadata" today was stored in USR files.
- Directory listing was agonizingly slow. I remember commandeering tracks 16 and 17 for my own hair-brained directory structure in an effort to speed things up.
This is a great story, and you're further along than I ever got in 1987! I had a C64 back then, too, and was fascinated by it, but never attempted anything this ambitious. Girlfriends, too, got the best of me! Fast forward nearly 40 years, and I finally built my Unix-inspired shell for it, just with a very different kind of assistant helping with the assembly. :)
The directory speed problem is real. I sidestepped it entirely by keeping the filesystem RAM-resident (max 8 entries, heap at $6000), which makes LS instant but obviously volatile. Your track 16/17 commandeering approach is incredible and fascinating. MATRIX sounds amazing, and you should dig it up and finish it now! :)
Fun fact: "Government mule" isn't just an expression, it's a real thing. And the U.S. government, including the Forest Service, still employs teams of mules to carry things to places that can't be reached any other way.
"Fix up my packs. Load the 2 mules with 225# each. Take the 2 loads to trail camp at Lake Everett, Unload. Have lunch with the Trail cook. Haze mules & ride to 7 1/2 PM."
Horses are mentioned 2586 times. That'd be a whole study on how they're used in the back country. (Edit: horse number is inflated since part of the diary form at one point asks for "Horse Mileage". Will have to refine search).
If you go backpacking in the Sierra Nevada (or other mountains, surely) you may just run into a mule train carrying a trail maintenance crew and their gear.
Awesome for one man bands. Or maybe Panic. But my Finance department is never going to approve that purchase.
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